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In reply to CapatainReality:

We have over 10 000 members spread around the world. In terms of finance and time, this site is overall a modest loss for us. We were a free site for 17 months. For a considerable time after that our prices were $10 for a whole year. Our current prices are $20 for a whole year, which makes us twelve times cheaper than mainstream dating sites. The vast majority of members here don’t pay for membership. We were offered advertising space on a tv channel a few months ago, but the price tag of several thousand dollars was far too much for us. Maybe that was a good thing as we don’t know how many potential members watch mainstream tv now.

In the last few months, we have given some members the ability to message others for free. We may change this shortly as running this site is costing us too much money and time. For more details see https://unjabbed.net/topic/free-accounts/

Your country of Portugal is one of the worst represented on this site. We have tried online advertising for Portugal, but it does not work. People register with our site, see there are not many other people around and then delete their accounts on the same day. Almost 95% of Portugal had covid vaccines, which compares to 80% for other countries in Western Europe.

Our site is more succesful in Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands, because we found news websites who were willing to let us advertise in their printed newspapers and websites. We have found no equivalents for Portugal. Also we know of no good Twitter/X accounts where we can target our adverts for the Portuguese.

A site such as ours costs several thousand dollars a year to run. Our costs are Internet webserver hosting, core software, administration and online advertising. Online advertising is necessary. Our members increased from very low numbers to approximately one thousand for several countries after advertising. People only stay on a site if they see lots of other people around and the only way to achieve this is with advertising. This costs money.

The social media sites and apps you use are free because they are paid for by billionaires, government (directly or indirectly), the stock market (this means your pension funds) and university grants. We have no such sources of funding. If an app has hundreds of millions of users, then their their owners’ annual bill just for Internet bandwidth can be estimated to be in the millions of dollars per year. This is just for Internet bandwidth and does not include staff wages, renting an office, computer hardware etc. We are not millionaires. We have no sources of external funding. We pay for this site ourselves. You may want to ask yourself why people are giving away millions to tens of millions of dollars away per year just so people can have free social media sites and apps. For example some smartphone apps require your phone number and the ability to read your phone’s contact list of phone numbers. Now they are one step away from knowing your real identity and the real identity of everyone you are in contact with. Many free social media apps scan your messages with AI now.

During 2020 and 2021, free social media sites and apps censored a lot of information. This has caused the issue you are trying to solve by registering with our site. Now you think we are the problem, because we are not millionaires who can afford to give way thousands of dollars away per year.

The Internet is a harsh place. Having to pay a small sum of money makes most people think before they start to message other people. If we remained a free site, we would be overwhelmed with spammers, scammers and annoying people. There are two types of people on our site. People who want to meet those living nearby and others who are quite happy to message people on the other side of the world. Without the requirement of having to pay a small sum of money, the latter will drive the former off this site. Some women have deleted or hidden their profiles and told us they receive too many messages from men too far away to realistically have a relationship with.